


Five Minutes to Midnight

by counterheist



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Additional tags and pairings to be added, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Angst and Humor, Awful Werewolf Dirty Talk: Ovaries Edition, Derek Hale's Terrible Life Decisions, F/M, Female Derek Hale, Hale Family Feels, delicious irony, there is derek hale there has to be angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 12:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek Hale is a woman on a mission. Or, five times Derek Hale tried to get someone to knock her up, and the fallout of that one time it actually worked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Minutes to Midnight

Her eyes stray open before she properly wakes, and Derek comes back to the world with her thoughts burning just as much as the gashes on her chest. There’s a knife in her gut trying to split her apart, and distantly she registers the slow, sluggish feeling of bones knitting themselves back together. Ligaments reattaching. Bruise blood smoothing back out into her veins. Rolling over, she blocks out the sun and tries to forget. Which is when, of course, she begins to remember. There isn’t a knife, but if she’s lucky there also isn’t an Ennis anymore.

It feels like she still has all her limbs.

She wiggles her toes.

It is highly likely she still has all of those too, although the bottoms of her feet are uneven. Did she heal over gravel again? Derek hates healing over gravel, or dirt, or glass, because then she has to injure herself all over again to get the bits and pieces out. Laura used to hold her hand, during; and before that, her mother.

Laura’s dead, though.

So is Derek’s mother.

Derek is terrible at forgetting. Terrible at forgetting, awful at moving on, shaky on strategizing, and only as aware as she’s able, which maybe explains the jump in her heart when she feels breath on the back of her neck.

“Uh,” Blake yawns, everything about him stilted and half-started, never following through, “where is your bathroom?”

There is definitely gravel underneath the skin of Derek’s heels, but the rest of her feels better by the second. She’s closing up and off after the night before, and in a few hours she’s going to be completely fine again. As fine as she ever is, which is mostly, despite what anyone else ever says. Like Peter. Or Scott. Or Laura, while they drove from city to city and pretended not to be runaways. Except Laura’s dead now.

“Downstairs. To the left.”

“Thanks,” he stills, “shit, that was the least ro— I. I meant, that was amazing, and I know I said—”

For the first time in about three days, Derek smiles. Laura’s still dead, and Peter’s still not, and Derek still can’t kill all the people she needs to kill, but Blake is the kind of simple she hasn’t felt in forever – one plus one, he’s a boy, she’s a girl – and for some reason he wants to stay with her even though she’s a mess that gets everyone around her killed. She should keep telling him he should leave, for his own safety, but. At this point, her heart’s not in it.

Maybe he’ll be the one who stays safe.

Maybe he’ll be the one who changes everything.

Instead of a warning she manages an “I’ll still be here,” marvels that it sounds half as dry as she meant it and nowhere near as needy as she really feels, and nuzzles her head back underneath her pillow. The sun still shines too bright.

Laura is still too dead.

Blake stumbles out of her bed, and down her staircase, and eventually finds the bathroom. Derek stops listening at that point. Maybe she should have stopped listening earlier, maybe she shouldn’t listen at all, but it’s difficult not to. And that’s not just her. She knows that’s not just her. It’s not just her worry and her fear, and her need to know that she hasn’t gotten anyone else killed. It’s not. It’s biology. Laura said as much on the drive to New York. Derek’s mother said as much when Derek was fifteen and maybe in love for the first time ever, and it hurt so much and so good that she failed every quiz until she got it together and had her first kiss.

She thought she was clever, back then, good at hiding how she felt. Good at hiding who she was. Derek thought her mother started talking about the moon and growing up because she was an alpha, and a mom, and so being vague and embarrassing was pretty much the only job she had. Derek’s mom was always cryptic while cooking, and always giving advice in the garden, and she’d told Derek about the pull on a Saturday midmorning between the carrots and the peas.

 _Family is important,_ she said.

 _You’re going to want your own so much,_ she said, _but there’s always time._

_You’re so young, Derek, and there’s always time._

The bathroom door slides open again and Derek doesn’t get up.

Belatedly, she realizes she should have used the time to go after her feet. The sheets are streaked with blood anyway; who knows if Blake would notice a little more. He’ll definitely notice her clawing at herself. She’d rather not have to explain that. She’d rather not have to explain anything.

Who is she kidding?

She won’t explain anything anyway.

She can’t.

When he reappears at the top of the staircase she meets him there, tossing the sheets to the side and ignoring the internal slice under the balls of her feet. “Hey,” she says. Before he can reply she kisses him. He squeaks, a little, and maybe this is going to be okay. Maybe she really is allowed to have things of her own and not fuck it up.

As it turns out, she really can’t.

“H-how?” is all Blake has to say before Derek knows this, of course, is probably going to end badly. Everything ends badly for Derek. It started when she was born and it’s going to end when she finally manages to die, and. And. And she huffs out a laugh against Blake’s shoulder, teeth too sharp, at how her internal monologue sounds like a fucking teenager. Next thing she knows she’s going to show up outside Blake’s bedroom window in the middle of the night.

It’s going to be high school all over again.

The last thing Derek wants is high school all over again, even though she’s doing a prize job of making it seem like what she wants is _exactly that_. She spends more time in the parking lot than any of the parents dropping off their actual kids. She’s helped Isaac with his history homework. Fuck, she’s even dating a teacher.

Dating?

Sleeping… with?

Fuck.

Again, she kisses him instead of giving him an answer. It’s easy, and, in a way a kiss is its own answer. A kiss means _I like you_ , and _I like this_ , and _we’re crazy for wanting each other right now but let’s do it anyway_. Blake kisses her back like he understands. Derek thinks he might, even if he doesn’t understand anything else because she doesn’t tell him about anything else. She stalls him every time he tries.

In the end he picks up his clothes, twice offers to help wash the breakfast dishes, and disappears into the morning. His old car rumbles down the street in the direction of the school, and Derek doesn’t stop listening until she can’t hear the sound. It’s not until she’s staring at the dishes in the sink and wondering whether she can bully Cora into washing them that Derek begins to remember the details of the night before. Over breakfast she recalled almost sliding down the stairs, legs akimbo through the steps, how Blake had struggled – “I just need you to lift your leg, Derek, oh, _oh_ , I swear I’m not touching th-you-those on purpose you just need to _stand_ ”— to get her from one step to the next. In the shower she remembered the first of her wounds sealing themselves up, smooth skin as good as new, like always, like it should be.

It’s not until Blake is long out of sight – and smell, taste, hearing, touch – that she remembers the things she said.

Standing by her kitchen sink, Derek realizes she’s been feeling the pull for days. Ever since the last full moon there’s been something different in the back of her mind, and it’s probably been the pull all along. She’s only been too busy, or too much of an idiot, to notice it sooner. By now it’s less of a pull and more of a sharp push down the side of a steep hillside. Her feet have fallen out from under her.

She’s rolling.

She needs this.

Cora finds her sitting at her – their – only table, staring out the window at the birds flying around the neighboring rooftops. The dishes sit dripping in the rack because Derek has to occupy her hands if she wants to stop herself from occupying her mind, but there’s still one cold mug sitting out on the counter. Cora picks it up and throws it at Derek’s head before launching herself into Derek’s arms, scratching and crying and swearing all at once.

“Never do that again,” Cora growls, “Never.”

People used to say the Hale sisters could pass for the same girl at different times of her life. Derek didn’t see it before, too much the middle child, but now she does. Cora in her arms cries like Derek did once, with sleepless eyes, the first time Laura left a motel in search of coffee without waking Derek up first. She might have said the same things, too, the same ‘never’s. The same ‘you can’t’s and ‘you idiot’s.

But Derek can never be Laura.

And she hopes to the memory of their mother that Cora will never, _ever_ be Derek.

That hope is the best thing Derek can give her sister at this point. That and proof that she’ll keep fighting. “I’ll be here,” Derek promises. As far as promises go, it’s safe. She can’t promise her life, but she can promise not to run away again. She can promise to always fight. “I’ll be here.”

Cora mumbles about losing her again, and looks so young, so seventeen, that Derek needs to go for a run and maybe break something. Because Derek’s not the only one who thought her entire family was dead, was she? Cora doesn’t say much about the past six years. After the past six months, she doesn’t need to. Derek’s had a taste of being the last Hale too. She hated it.

It’s more than biology. It’s family.

“I’ll be here.”

— 

Their next date is less a date and more Blake worrying over some bloody gashes on Derek’s arms. Derek doesn’t explain how she got them and Blake doesn’t ask. A warm feeling spreads through Derek’s chest because he’s not asking, he’s not making her say things she doesn’t want to say, and she imagines that this is the closest she’s ever going to get to perfect in Beacon Hills.

Cleaning turns into licking, kissing, pressing him into the nearest support beam, and through it all Blake’s making these _noises_ and Derek can smell how much he wants her. Not her family, or her power, or her pack. Her. Blake wants her, and that’s a really stupid decision, on his part, but she’s grateful for it because it means she gets to have him.

“We should,” he mumbles. “You know.”

She knows.

He pulls a foil square out of his pocket, and she’s strangely grateful that they met how they did, where they did, because when she crumples it and throws it off into a corner he doesn’t question her at all. Instead he guides her back to her bed and she lets him. He slips the tattered shirt off her shoulders, mindful of the scratches running along her ribs, and she lets him.

Blake covers Derek with himself and she lets him, because she trusts him.

It’s been a long time since Derek really trusted anyone, but she trusts Blake. She doesn’t really know why. It might be because she loves the way he looks at her, or it might be because he needs her. She tries not to think about it too deeply. When Derek thinks she remembers.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?”

Not really, no. She says as much without saying anything, and they distract each other from the conversation so thoroughly that the pink on the skyline makes her loft look soft and alive before they try talking again.

“So,” he starts, “I probably should go.”

“You probably should.”

“I have about two weeks of grading to get to,” he laughs, “and they’re having me substitute for other teachers now, too, and he didn’t leave a rubric so I guess everyone’s getting an A in Physics this semester. I barely remember what Newtonian mechanics even _means_ , Derek.”

Derek knows, but that’s only because Laura made her apply to schools when she turned eighteen. Laura made Derek do a lot of things, as though she could pull the both of them out of their grief and into some approximation of a normal functioning life just by sheer force of will. Derek knows how to arrange flowers because Laura thought they should both take weekend classes at the community center. To make some friends, Laura said, normal people have friends. Normal people aren’t afraid to have friends, and normal people don’t get groceries in the middle of the night when no one’s around, and normal people go to school unless they have a job already which you don’t.

She still doesn’t. But she will. She’ll fix that once she fixes this town.

“Hey?”

Derek pulls herself back. “Hey.” She needs to stop thinking about Laura when she’s supposed to be living her own life. Laura would hate that.

Blake has his tie on sideways and one foot through the leg of a very rumpled pair of slacks. He smiles at her like she’s never done anything wrong, ever, and even if there was nothing else about him to like, she’d love that.

— 

He brings it up on a rainy Tuesday.

She plays it down.

He brings it up again later, when she’s letting him spoon her and play with her fingers underneath the covers.

“It’s not,” he blurts, “an idea that I don’t like, it’s just. Sudden. It’s just really soon, and we’re taking this so fast and you keep showing up around me covered in other people’s blood and _your own_ blood and that can’t be a good environment for raising children. Derek, you can’t take care of a baby if you’ve been _stabbed_ , and I can’t take care of a baby on my own, and—”

He takes a deep breath and kisses her, and it’s an awkward angle but it’s still satisfying that he’s learned that this is better than talking in circles. Sometimes there’s time to talk, and sometimes there isn’t, and sometimes it’s much less embarrassing to just ignore it.

Blake rolls her over and runs his hands down to the small of her back.

“I need this,” she says.

“Okay,” he breathes.

She doesn’t even have to explain the pull.

— 

The memory Derek most likes to keep is the one of Blake’s frozen face, mouth half open, trying to dodge a bullet. She likes it better than the memory of her fingers clenched around his liar’s throat, his eyes darting around her loft looking for an escape. This says something, because the desperate fear on his face is a memory she likes to keep when she thinks about all the things that came after that moment in time.

The memories of all the things before – before Cora got sick, and Derek went back to the loft to get her things while Peter kept watch, and Scott and Stiles came running out of the elevator shouting about – hurt too much because she should have known. Blake was always giving Derek what she wanted. Getting what she wants is never good for Derek, because what Derek wants always, without fail, ruins her life. Those pink skyline sunrise memories hurt just as much as blue eyes and stolen minutes in a dark car after swim team.

All of them but one.

“I know you said you wanted me to fuck you until you were pregnant with my children,” he managed, standing stock still near the hole in her wall that she never got around to fixing, “But I thought you meant that more in a metaphoric sense.”

She’d blinked at him, and then down at the pregnancy test on the table next to her, and then back up at him. He’d looked like he was dying.

At the time, she’d thought it was funny, that he was panicking. She’d said please, and he’d said yes, and obviously she would be the one to provide for them. Once there was a them. She’d only picked up the test to have one, just in case. Derek had had an aunt who had lost the edge to her senses when she’d gotten pregnant and it had taken her weeks to figure it out. With the test, Derek was covering her bases.

The look on Blake’s face stays Derek’s favorite even after years go by, and she’s never entirely sure why.

**Author's Note:**

> I started thinking about what Terrible Werewolf Dirty Talk would be like for lady werewolves, and then this happened. And then it turned into angsty introspection with pretty much zero dirty talking in it at all. I don't know what happened either.
> 
> Derek is still Derek because. None of the other names I’ve seen for her have stuck for me. Warnings and pairings will update with the chapters. I haven't fully decided who each of Derek's partners is going to be, but I'll tell you now the +1's gonna be Stiles. 
> 
> Title is in reference to the Doomsday Clock. Thanks to [ohu](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shiny_glor_chan/pseuds/shiny_glor_chan) for the read through.


End file.
